For the past few years, we have seen a significant portion of our data storage move to the cloud. When it comes to physical hard drives, spinning disk hard drives are rapidly being replaced by flash storage. Some would assert that storage icons have not aged particularly well given the circumstances.

Nevertheless, ever since the original OS X hard drive icons were designed, this category of icons has been a touchstone for icon design practitioners. Whether designing a custom application icon, a commercial disk image or making a custom icon to distinguish one's personal drives, hard drive icons have been a prime area for designers to display their skill in both technical execution and creativity.

This post is hardly exhaustive. I have selected only a fraction of the incredible icons that community members have designed over the years.

Drives Inspired by Apple Hardware

The PowerMac G5 and PowerBook G4.

Hard drive icons by Henri Liriani, Sascha Höhne and Dave Brasgalla.

Beginning in the early 2000s, designers began taking inspiration from Apple's hardware industrial design for the design of custom HD icons. On the far left is a drive from Henri Liriani's Zvend icon set (2006). The second icon from the left comes from Sascha Höhne's Minium icon set (2005). The two rightmost icons are from the G5 Drives set by Iconfactory designer Dave Brasgalla. He also included a custom drive which took inspiration from the then recently released Matrix films.

Similar to Rask, Louie Mantia made Ive Drives (2009) and Ive Drives 2 (2012), paying homage to the Airport as well as the first and second generation Apple TVs.

Baumann's PodDrives and Blend.

For PodDrives (2009) and Blend (2007) Laurent Baumann referenced the original iPhone hardware and the Apple remote.

Anstat by Philipp Antoni.

Philipp Antoni's Anstat set was designed between 2006 and 2008, and was released much later, in 2012. Anstat was an idealized take on the Mac system icons.

Bach Nguyen's UniDrive.

Alumi by Joy-Vincent Niemantsverdriet.

Bach Nguyen, otherwise known as Shiizun, referenced the unibody MacBook Pro in his 2009 UniDrive icon set. Using the same source material as Nguyen, Joy-Vincent Niemantsverdriet designed his Alumi set in 2010.

Hard Drive Internals

I asked Buzz Anderson who was responsible for the PodWorks icon, and it turns out that it was none other than Dave Brasgalla of The Iconfactory in 2002.

Expandrive by Jordan Langilleo.

In my search to determine who made the accordion-like Expandrive icon, I came up with nothing. I decided to phone Jeff Mancuso of Expandrive to see if he could shed any light as to its origins. Mancuso had hired Jordan Langilleo of OneToad Design to design the icon in 2008.

For his 2005 Smooth Leopard iconset, Susumu Yoshida made this exposed internal hard drive. In 2007, David Lanham of the Iconfactory made a similar drive for Agua Extras vol. 1. Na Wong produced the DMG document icon for this variant one year later in 2008.

Drive Apps

O and O defrag by Nikolay Verin (2009). While this app was for Windows, it has the same roots as the rest of the icons listed.

.DMG Icons

.dmg icons for DMG Canvas, Opera and Spotify.

Diligent designers like Opera's Oleg Melnychuk and Tobias Ahlin, formerly of Spotify, customize the icon of their application's .dmg to make the installation process a bit more personalized and less tedious.

Hard Drive icons going forward

OS X Yosemite system HD.

This brings us to OS X Yosemite's hard drive. Unlike previous metal and plastic drives, today's are made entirely of wax. These details matter, or at least they used to.